“Realistically, it’s something that can’t be playing on our minds. It’s something we just have to put to the backs of our minds and focus on our performance and not let it affect us too much as it maybe has in the past.”

Galway’s Division 2 final win was, ironically, their own first win in the league or Championship at Croke Park since 2001.

It was Kildare’s second league final loss in a row at the venue having surprisingly slipped up against Clare in the 2016 Division 3 showpiece.

It doesn’t help their cause that they’ll need to beat the six-in-a-row Leinster champions to arrest that terrible run of Croker results.

Kelly said: “It’s something that we can’t dwell on. Going into this match after a four-week break, you can tend to think about the game a lot and delve into things a bit more than you should.

“But it’s just important that we keep the heads down and that we don’t focus on things we can’t control. We can’t control the venue or the opposition so we just have to focus on ourselves.”

Kildare looked slick and sharp when dispatching Meath by nine points in Tullamore last month.

But Dublin followed up with a 31-point demolition of Westmeath in the other semi-final, underlining their provincial supremacy.

Kelly said: “The Westmeath game was a wake-up call for us after the win over Meath. We had a week after the Meath game where we were happy with our performance for the most part and then the Dublin game brought us right back down to earth again. It just showed how much work we still had to do.”